Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.3

c11.3

THE regions of Western India which comprise Baluchistan, the Makran and Sind are today forbidding, barren mountains, arid desert and sandy waste. But through them, on the eastern boundary of the region, the River Indus, controlled by the Sukkur Barrage and its attendant irrigation canals, brings a strip of rich alluvial lands. The Makran coast stretches eastwards from the Persian border at Gwatar for over three hundred miles of uninviting sandhills and mangrove swamps at the mouths of shallow, turgid streams, while behind the narrow coastal plain the mountains rise stony and bare in fantastic eroded sky-lines like a lunar landscape. Inland, as the massif builds up northwards, it runs in irregular ridges which rise above the 7,000-feet contour: the intervening river valleys, such as those of the Mashkai, the Nal or the Hab Rivers, are isolated one from another, and east-to-west communication must follow the regular routes, which take advantage of the ‘laks’ or passes across the ranges, or, gaining the valleys of the rivers running eastward into Sind, follow the courses of the Mula or the Gaj obliquely to the plain below.